February 4, 2020
Claire Quigley and Miriam Iorweth are curating a ‘Subsonic’ workshop and algorave at the Scottish Submarine Centre on Friday 20 March as part of the Euleroom Equinox 2020 livecoding event.
There is an introductory workshop 1930 to 2030, followed by an algorave 2030 to 1030. The workshop is free, the algorave is pay what you want.
If you’d like to take part in the workshop or are interested in performing at the algorave, contact Miriam:
crotchetymusic@gmail.com
eflyers:
Subsonic Algorave 2020.pdf Subsonic Algorave Workshop.pdf
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December 31, 2019
As 2019 draws to a close, I’m spending some time getting ready for the International Conference on Livecoding in February in Limerick. I put in two proposals. The first of these was to be called The ‘All-Pressure No-Method’ System, and would have involved me working with four live brass players. I say ‘would have’: this has had to be abandoned, we were not able to fund the travel and accomodation for the players.
The central idea, however, is one I’d like to return to. Inspired particularly by the work of Kate Sicchio in livecoding dancers, the intention was to livecode the brass players by means of a repertoire of typed and projected instructions. Here’s a demo video of the concept:
https://youtu.be/8vk53ZiDN_s
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December 31, 2019
The work that I will be taking to ICLC 2020 in Limerick is entitled ‘Perang Gagal: a Series of Inconclusive Battles’, and is a collaboration with Professor Mel Mercier at the Irish Word Academy of Music and Dance. I will performing livecode in SuperCollider as part of a small gamelan ensemble let by Mel. Here’s the demo video I submitted to the conference call:
https://youtu.be/yN1STGvmRqY
I had thought that the eventual piece would be straightforward to devise, but it is proving trickier than I thought. There are couple of limitations. We won’t have access to a full gamelan for the conference. I had hoped to visit Limerick to work with the players in advance, but that has not proved possible: instead, I am going to send sketches of the material I am working on to Mel, and we will put the piece together during the conference.
The third limitation is around pulse. I want this piece to be rhythmic, but I do not feel confident about trying to get SuperCollider to follow the tempo and pulse of a live ensemble of gamelan musicians. Consequently, I am having to devise material where SuperCollider establishes some sort of groove that the live players will follow.
So far I have four potential sections for the piece. As ever, I am reworking existing materials. ‘fibblesticks’ and ‘Adrift & Afloat’ are ‘counting pieces’ that employ numerical frameworks to allow performers to play together in time, while leaving pitch inderminate: or rather, when working with the gamelan, projecting the entire complement of available notes, pelog in this case.
I have on a number of occasions performed a sort of quasi-Javenese gamelan texture in SuperCollider, using samples of the Spirit of Hope instruments here in Glasgow. For Limerick, I have reworked this by adding a balungan part for the live players.
The fourth section for the piece is new, and is based around a couple of musical ideas that occured to me in a dream and that were still in my head on awakening:
Many of my musical ideas originate in this way!
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December 31, 2019
In order to be able to work up sketches for ‘Perang Gagal’ at ICLC in Limerick, I wanted to use Logic to compose demos of the material for the live players that I could then improvise with in SuperCollider. This poses the problem of how to sync the pulse and tempo between the two programmes, which proved annoyingly difficult to accomplish!
Ideally, I would have liked to set the tempo in SuperCollider for Logic to follow. A straightforward way to do this would have been for SC to send MIDI clock and have Logic follow but, annoyingly, Logic does not support slaving to MIDI clock.
According to the Logic help, it should be possible to sync to an audio click from Logic. I couldn’t get this to work, and nobody on the Logic Users Group seemed to be able to help either.
The eventual solution was less than perfect. I used Logic to send MIDI clock, and had SuperCollider slave to that. This involved using the MIDISyncClock extension from H. James Harkins ddwMIDI quark. Not perfect, but got the job done.
What did work very well indeed was the recently released Blackhole tool for passing audio between mac applications. I’d definitely recommend this as a replacement for Soundflower!
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May 31, 2019
Here’s the collaboration that Bill Whitmer and I did for Radiophrenia
https://youtu.be/FpvYl_PwvTk
May 22, 2019
This week I’m taking my algorave work in a new direction. In collaboration with Bill Whitmer, we are going to be presenting a half-hour show called ‘Radio Automata Live in the Studio’ as part of Radiophrenia, a temporary art radio station broadcasting from the CCA in Glasgow.
The idea for the show is: if the last remaining creative decisions in broadcast radio were entirely automatic, would anyone notice? Bill has been experimenting with algorithmically generated text and chatbots for the spoken part of the show. For my part, I’m going to be creating cut-up mashups using the slicing techniques I’ve been developing in SuperCollider.
In previous work along these lines, I’ve always used source material that was either explicitly open source, or, at least, grey-area material that I was unlikely to be sued for, like old TV themes and midi module demo songs.
In this show, for the first time I’m taking a so-sue-me approach, using… well, I won’t give the game away, but some *very* well known material indeed, arising from ‘suggestions’ ‘made’ by the bots Bill has been working with. In early experiments this is sounding very interesting indeed. Watch this space, or rather, listen to this wavelength!
- 23rd May 2019
- 1100-1130
- 87.9FM across Glasgow
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March 26, 2019
Improviser Núria Andorrà visited Glasgow in March to teach on the International Collaboration in Contemporary Improvisation module at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow. My colleage Una McGlone took the opportunity to organise a gig for her at Hairdressers, in collaboration with a number of Glasgow improvisers.
I did a short set alongside trumpet player Robert Henderson, who I have known for many years: in fact, I know him from the period around twenty years ago where I myself was active as a gigging trumpet player! For this performance, I used a bank of sounds that I have created using purely mechanical sounds from a trumpet, the metal, valves, valve slides and so forth. It’s always slightly problematic livecoding alongide an actual analog musician, as it is not easy to respond particularly rapidly to another player. However, Robert and I enjoyed playing together and managed to create some satisfying musical gestures together.
No recording made, unfortunately!
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February 18, 2019
I shared an algorave spot at Sound Thought with Claire Quigley, that was streamed as part of the TOPLAP 15th anniversary stream. You can see her set here and mine is here, although I have to say not that happy with the way my performance turned out on the day. The rehearsal was better:
https://youtu.be/zQwASJEnYEY
As you can see, combining my livecoding work with my passion for table tennis! And, in fact, this was a new technical discovery just the day before: it is possible to use Atom to livecode simultaneously in Hydra and SuperCollider, using a plugin for SC. I’m not sure this is intended behaviour, but in practice if you have Hydra running in Atom and then switch to a page of SC code, the Hydra visuals run on behind that code.
Amongst other things, Claire is a colleage of mine at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she teaches coding to the music education students. We’re hoping to do more work together in the future.
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January 28, 2019
I’m looking for music and/or visual artists working with live code who are interested in joining me for an improvised algorave as part of Sound Thought 2019.
‘Livecoding’ is a practice where creative artists who work with computer code perform live, often producing music and/or visuals, with the audience typically able to watch the evolution of the code on a projected screen. ‘Algorave’ is a subgenre where the aim is to produce beat-driven music and/or visuals for dancing.
Examples of the kind of software we’re talking about include:
Music: Sonic Pi http://sonic-pi.net/ TidalCycles http://tidalcycles.org/ FoxDot http://foxdot.org/ SuperCollider https://supercollider.github.io/ Troop https://github.com/Qirky/Troop Estuary http://intramuros.mcmaster.ca:8002/ Gibber http://gibber.cc/ ChucK http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ Pd https://puredata.info/ Overtone http://overtone.github.io/
Visuals: Hydra https://github.com/ojack/hydra LiveCodeLab https://livecodelab.net/ VEDA https://veda.gl/ PraxisLIVE https://www.praxislive.org/ Processing https://processing.org/ fluxus http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ The Force https://videodromm.com/The_Force/ LiveCoder http://livecoder.net/
More about algorave https://algorave.com/ and livecoding https://toplap.org/
Drop me an email on js.vanderwalt@rcs.ac.uk if interested!
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January 21, 2019
Some reflections on the International Conference on Livecoding 2019 in Madrid.
The play-and-tell workshop that I helped put together with Evan Raskob and Renick Bell was, as intended, a low key and informal way for people to share their individual practices in livecode. Of particular interest to me was Dimitris Kyriakoudis showing how he uses heavily customised keyboard shortcuts in emacs as a way to be completely fluent when performing: as he put it, ’typing should not get in the way of livecoding performance’. There were also some very interesting links to my mind between his Timelines system – ‘all music is a function of time’ and Neil C Smith’s ‘AMEN $ Mother Function’ performance that worked by chopping up a wavetable as a function of time.
As well as that session, I also had input to a paper entitled ‘Towards Improving Collaboration Between Visualists and Musicians at Algoraves’ co-authored by – deep breath – Zoyander Street, Alejandro Albornoz, Renick Bell, Guy John, Olivia Jack, Shelly Knotts, Alex McLean, Neil C Smith, Atsushi Tadokoro, J. S. van der Walt and Gabriel Rea Velasco. The creation of this paper was itself an interesting process, beginning with a conversation in Sheffield, and then continuing with us writing the paper collaboratively in a shared online space. Guy presented the paper, you can see that here.
A stand-out performance for me was Maia Koenig’s ‘RRayen’, using some sort of hand-held games console. Great energy: I can’t seem to find a video of her performing at ICLC, but here she is doing the piece elsewhere.
Of the many new livecoding systems presented, I was rather taken by Balázs Kovács slighly bonkers Makkeróni ‘web-based audio operating system’, kind of like an online shared bash shell that plays music.
Also very interesting was Alejandro Franco and Diego Villaseñor and presenting their Nanc-in-a-Can Canon Generator. The cultural backround was fascinating, with an attention to reclaim Nancarrow as a Mexican composer as explained in the talk.
I’ve never been to Madrid before, but found it was an easy place to be: dry, cold, comfortable and easy to get around. ICLC 2020 is to be in Limerick, fairly local for me, so I’ll be looking to present or perform there as well.
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